Ten of us participated in a session that featured poets, all of whom had been recited before with the exception of Bruce Springsteen, a singer-songwriter who penned the lyrics of a contemporary protest song.
Arundhaty gave us an ekphrastic anti-war poem by Mary Oliver that takes off on a painting of blue horses by Franz Marc.
I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses
what war is.
They would either faint in horror, or simply
find it impossible to believe.
Devika chose a cryptic poem by Emily Dickinson in which she seems to dare God to take away a beloved person she has known.
Significance that each has lived
The other to detect
Discovery not God himself
Could now annihilate
Geetha recited the ‘dub’ poet Benjamin Zephaniah who performs on stage, reciting poems mostly to reggae rhythms.
Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops
De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots
Dis poetry is designed fe rantin
Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,
Joe was upset by the menacing way in which US Immigration authorities used military-style kidnaps to strike fear into the hearts of non-whites in America. It was so antithetical to the tenets of freedom of life and liberty enshrined in the US Constitution that it horrified many Americans; Bruce Springsteen gave voice to the horror in the song, The Streets of Minneapolis.
Now they say they're here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight
KumKum read a ’tiny’ 10-line poem by Louise Glück that ends abruptly with the cry
I want you.
Joe mentioned that when he read Louise Glück, he bought her volume of Poems 1962-2012. After reading almost the whole collection he chose a few that he could make sense of. But later he had a dream conversation with the poet in verse which is reported in the text below.
Pamela liked Mary Oliver’s poetry for its simplicity and freedom from constraints; reassuringly the poet states –
I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.
I’m just chattering.
Priya took on Rabindranath Tagore. There are more distinct blog posts on KRG’s website on him than on any other poet – the posts were to celebrate his 150th Birth anniversary in 2011. The eighth such post contains a song that pulls at the heartstrings, no matter how many times one hears it. That a poet could express such a yearning for a person, indirectly, is a miracle. In Hemanta Mukherjee’s baritone voce it takes on the life Tagore meant to infuse into the words. Listen here to the song Tumi Ki Kebali Chabi. The translation is Joe’s. Has any poet expressed the source of his muse better? –
kabir antharer tumi kabi
you are the poet within the poet
Saras took up Robert Service in an anti-war poem he wrote on the eve of WWI:
Rumours of world-war are rife,
Armageddon draweth near.
If your carcase you would save,
Hear, oh hear, the dreadful drum!
Fly to forest, cower in cave . . .
Brother, heed the wrath to come!
Shoba’s choice of England’s great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson was characterised by an elegiac poem which he derived from that fifteenth-century classic of English, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur. It contains the famous quote:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways
Thomo chose the first Duino Elegy of Rilke, which begins an intensely religious, mystical group of poems that employs the symbolism of angels and salvation. It begins:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?
He began the cycle of elegies in 1912 in the castle of Duino in Italy and completed it 10 years later in the smaller castle of Château de Muzot in the Swiss Valais. A castle composing poet, our Rilke was.
